WSDL-D: A Flexible Web Service Invocation Mechanism for Large Datasets

Abstract

WSDL Web services are built around the request-reply framework, requiring service invocation to be bundled together with all relevant data in a single message. Inefficiency becomes evident as Web service providers begin to offer more robust services that require massive datasets (e.g., multimedia and scientific data). Under the WSDL standards, these hefty datasets must be ported to an appropriate message format and transferred in their entirety upon each service invocation or response. Significant gains in service flexibility and performance can be made simply by separating invocation messages from their datasets. Such a separation ultimately grants service consumers the ability to pass parameter datasets from third party hosts, to maintain dataset parameters on the service provider host for use with future service invocations, and to provide datasets in a variety of different formats. In this paper, we develop a service invocation mechanism, called WSDL-D, to support this separation of service invocation from parameter datasets.